Animal Rights Quotes by Roedy

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Acceptable Cruelty

What is an acceptable level of animal cruelty? One way to figure it out is to ask yourself would it be
acceptable to do this to humans.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Activities of the Intelligent

What do intelligent species do that non-intelligent ones do not? Use tools, communicate with language and
torture.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Animal Communication

We have so far identified 70 different cries that elephants use to communicate. Alex
the grey parrot leaned to use, not just parrot, 150 words. Washoe the chimpanzee learned
350 words of ASL (American Sign Language). Uneducated humans use about 500 words. Educated ones make do with about 800. The range of human
contemplation is not that much greater than other animals.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Animal Compact

We humans have a sort of compact with domestic animals. We protect them from predators, we ensure they have
food, we protect their health. In return they give us milk and meat. I think we are
obligated to give them lives free from cruelty, reasonably close to life in the wild. But we have reneged. We care
not a whit for their well being. Everything is for human convenience. We cheated. We ripped them off.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Animal Cruelty

Some people argue that since animals cannot reason as well as humans, it does not matter if humans treat them
cruelly. Yet when a human is born with brain damage, preventing them from reasoning, we still treat them humanely.
What really counts is can they suffer.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Animal Cruelty Video

Imagine the outrage at a reality TV show where people shot puppies and kittens with arrows and guns and inserted
hooks in their mouths and dragged them behind vehicles. These shows are common, except that the animals selected
for maltreatment are deer, moose, ducks and fish.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Animal ESP (Extra Sensory Perception)

Of course, animals have extra sensory perception, but it is only extra-sensory relative to humans. To dolphins,
ultrasound is sensory, to elephants, infrasound is sensory and to dog, the ability to detect emotions in others
through enhanced sense of smell is no magic.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Animal Rights

Animals, even ones more intelligent than humans, such as cetacea and elephants have no rights at all in human
law. It is much like the apartheid system where black people or Palestinians have no rights and everyone sees this
as natural because religious tradition bestows special status on those currently with rights. The smug delusion of
superiority that sustains apartheid is one of the least attractive features of humans.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Animals are Sentient

People I don’t like often call for increased cruelty to animals on the grounds they are not sentient. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary Luxury Edition
defines sentient as able to perceive or feel things. A rabbit has ears to
hear, eyes to see, a nose to smell. It clearly can feel pain, fear and sexual excitement. Clearly it is sentient.
How can anyone in their right mind claim rabbits, whales, dolphins, seals, cattle, fish… are not sentient?
It must be that these people don’t know what the word means. They seem to use the word to mean, I care about it’s welfare.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Arquebus

The Spanish arquebus, the forerunner of the rifle, was designed primarily to kill
horses during battles.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Banning Factory Eggs

I think the selling of eggs except free range eggs should be illegal. Those caught buying or selling should be
treated with the same disdain we had for Michael Vick.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Bears

When female bears attack people, they are almost never euthanised, because It is in their
nature to protect their cubs. However, when bears come into back yards to eat the fruit, garbage or dirty
barbecue grills, they are often shot. This does not make sense. A bear eating garbage has not harmed any human. It
is surely just as in the bear’s nature to eat the banquet we humans put out especially when we humans have
shrunk their natural wild food supplies through climate change.

A more humane way to handle this is to put a GPS (Global Positioning System) collar on problem
bears. The collar could give the bear a shock it got to close to civilisation. It might only need be sufficient to
make the bear uncomfortable. If it did not work, the collar would warn authorities of a bear in forbidden territory
before it could get into trouble.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Blood Festival

This sounds so bizarre, you may think I am putting you on. Have a look at the
photos. In each of the mountain villages in Peru, once a year, the people capture one of Peru’s
600 endangered condors and lash it to the back of a bull. The terrified bull and condor
then try to kill each other to cheers of the town’s people including the children. The Peruvians justify this
animal cruelty on the grounds it is traditional and they consider it symbolic of liberation from Spain. Because of
the popularity of the spectacles, the federal authorities turn a blind eye.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Bull Baiting = Rodeos

In Shakespear’s time, genteel people watched bull baiting. They did not consider it cruel. They had been
doing it for centuries. Similarly, in modern day Canada, we have rodeos. It never occurs to the audience the
cowboys are tormenting the animals no matter how they bellow, buck and struggle or how many animals are killed each
year.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Bull Fighting

To this day, the Spanish torment and kill bulls for amusement. If we can demand the end to cock fights and dog
fights surely it is time to end bull fights world wide. If they refuse, then the rest of the world should boycott
all Spanish goods and services.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Butchering Vocabulary

I find it disgusting the way hunters refer to harvesting as if they had planted and cultivated the
moose like pumpkins, or game as if killing moose were like some carnival game. The proper word is
killing or shooting.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Caged Eggs

We don’t need to ban caged eggs. A photograph on the box of what the chickens contend with should shame
people into avoiding them.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Cat Cruelty

In the 14th century a popular game for two people was to nail a cat to a post, then compete to batter it to
death with their heads, at the risk of cheeks ripped open, or eyes scratched out by the frantic animal’s
claws.

Cat Killers

Domestic cats kill billions of endangered songbirds each year. There is opposition to stopping
them for the following reasons:

Cats are doted on as pets and owners think cats should be free to kill birds because cats enjoy killing
birds.

Cats are not malicious. It is their nature to catch and eat birds, so we should let them.

There are other ways birds are killed, such as windmills. Why pick on cats?

Cats are not an invasive species. They are people.

My thinking is all these reasons are irrelevant. We have to do something to stop the loss of so many endangered
birds which are important to agriculture for insect control. It is not about punishing cats, but protecting birds.
Possible measures include:

Dogs are not permitted to roam free killing wildlife, even if they have licences. The same rules should apply
to cats.

Some kind of high tech collar for a cat that warns birds of a pending attack. At the owner’s option, it
might be smart enough not to warn mice.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Cat Psi

Cats have a strange mental power to command humans to send fleets of ships out to fetch them fish.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Chickens are Not Vegetarians

A diet of pure grain is no more suitable for a cow or a chicken than it is for a human. Meat producers tout it
as if it were preferable to their natural diets.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Christian Parable

This is a parable. There was once a village that had been continuously occupied for thousands of years. Then
some new people moved in. At first they did their best to fit in, but then they started stealing food and then
pushing existing people off their land claiming it belonged to them. Their religion forced them to keep their
females continuously pregnant starting at puberty ending only at menopause. They rapidly overwhelmed the village by
sheer numbers. They started killing other villagers claiming there were stealing food, since the new comers claimed
title to all the land. (Their holy book gave them title.) I hope you were clever enough to guess that the village
was earth before people and the new people were humans, though I would not fault you if you thought I was talking
about the Jewish takeover of Palestine.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Cock Fighting

Today in America there are still some people who enjoy watching cocks fight with blades attached to their feet
or pit bulls fight to the death, but few yearn to watch a cat burned alive or a human broken on a wheel. This is
progress.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Coconuts vs Sharks

In Australia, each year coconuts kill 25 people and sharks 10. Yet you don’t see hunters out exterminating coconuts on the pretext of protecting
people.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Commerce in Babies

To be consistent, if you disapprove of buying and selling humans or human babies, you should also oppose the
buying and selling creatures of other species, especially fellow intelligent species like whales, dolphins and
elephants.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Compassion For Other Species

Nearly all man’s woes stem from his lack of compassion for other species. Huh? How could that be?
Man’s problems are nearly all about destroying the environment that sustains him. If he had any consideration
at all for other species, he would not do that.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Cowardly Spanish Bull Fights

I don’t care how long they have been doing it, the Spanish bull fights are barbaric and cowardly. It is
time they stopped. The French fight the bulls fairly without swords, risking their own necks, but not harming the
bulls.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Dangerous Animals

Most people know that keeping an adult chimpanzee in your house is not a wise idea. They could at any time eat
your face off, rip off your testicles, slit your belly open, and bite off all your fingers. Most people know that
keeping a trained bear or tiger requires extreme care. But people get quite careless about keeping pit bulls or
orcas. Some Christian sects risk their children’s lives by forcing them to handle poisonous snakes. What is
the error these people make? They look at the usual docile behaviour and ignore the potential for violent
behaviour. If a creature has fangs, the fangs are there for a reason. It is only a matter of the right
constellation of circumstances and they will use them. The same is true for humans who carry knives, guns or
nuclear weapons.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Dawn of Animal Rights

The first animal rights legislation was passed in Ireland in 1635. It prohibited
pulling wool off sheep and attaching ploughs to horses’ tails.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Deafening Dogs

10% of Dalmatians born are deaf. Imagine selectively breeding humans to be deaf. We
would not put up with it.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Dealing with Warming

Americans have emitted so much greenhouse gas that it is causing record temperatures. Americans deal with it
with trips to the beach, iced drinks and air conditioning. The wild animals have access to no such relief.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Deformed Dogs

The canine nose is a masterpiece of evolution. For dogs, it has replaced sight as the primary sense organ.
Breeding dogs with pushed-in faces that deform the nose is deliberately blinding
them.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Development Is Poison to Other Species

People claim that more development is needed to support growing populations to save threatened species.
Development always hurts other species. Human population growth always hurts other species. Trying to save
threatened species with development is like try to put out a fire with gasoline.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Disability Consistency

If humans with severe disabilities are still considered persons in the law, then any animal than shows similar
functionality should enjoy the legal protections of personhood too.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Do Fish Feel Pain?

Read Do Fish Feel Pain?
by Victoria Braithwaite for the latest science. To a child, it is obvious fish indeed feel pain. They writhe when
poked, same as people. Science now concurs.

Even a genius like René Descartes got it wrong. Even though he knew full-well that fish and humans had
almost identical nervous systems, he ignored that evidence and swallowed an ancient Catholic superstition, that
people have invisible, undetectable souls but all animals including fish do not. Therefore men are conscious and
fish are not. Therefore people feel pain but fish do not.

According to Catholicism, fish are like robots that just pretend to feel pain. His Catholic mother drummed into
him the Catholic doctrine that animals have no rights of any kind. God created them for the sole purpose of
pleasing humans. They can not actually feel pain no matter how it looks. This rationalisation allowed people of the
time to indulge extreme brutality toward all animals with a clear conscience.

Anyone who has kept tropical fish, like myself, is frustrated by the aggressive ignorance of people who enjoy
finding inventive ways to make fish miserable, but never stop for a second to study them. They remind me of the
ignorance and denial of slave owners.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Dog Fighting

In rural Alabama, the biggest business is dog fighting. They capture local pets for bait animals. The locals are
known for taking the law into their own hands. They drove out the drug dealers, but they are afraid of the dog
fighters whose clients include large crowds of the most wealthy Alabamans.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Dogs Or Chickens

In Thailand, gangs round up wild and pet dogs and smuggle them into Viet Nam. There they force feed them. Then
they skin them alive in front of the other dogs awaiting this treatment and boil them in pots. The meat sells for
three times pork because superstition claims it cures erectile dysfunction. The process spreads rabies. Westerners
hearing this are usually horrified and perhaps may fantasise about skinning the dog killers alive. Yet the
westerners hire people to do pretty much the same thing to chickens and think nothing of it.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Dolphin Frustration

When I was working at the Human Dolphin Foundation, Dr. John Lilly told me this story. A researcher came to
investigate dolphin intelligence. He had an apparatus with two paddles and red and green light. The dolphin was
supposed to hit the left paddle the green light went on and the right paddle when the red light went on. Lilly
warned the researcher this would be far too boring. It would need at least a dozen lights. The researcher
persisted. The dolphin figured it out within a couple of trials. The researchers said he needed 30 trials to be statistically significant. The dolphin tossed the apparatus out of the tank and would
never let the researcher back into the tank.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Dolphin Souls

Do dolphins have souls? is an even sillier question than Do
dolphins have RAM (Random Access Memory)
? Nobody has ever demonstrated that anyone or anything has a soul. It is as imaginary as a unicorn.
Possession of a soul is used as an excuse, a licence for bad behaviour, for humans to mistreat other species.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Dolphins and Humans

Why do dolphins hang out around humans? Perhaps they are waiting for the music to start.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Earthworm Habits

Earthworms like to congregate in balls in coffee grounds.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Does this mean that coffee is a more healthful food than generally presumed, or that earthworms
too like to get buzzed?

Eating Jesus

Scientists have grown artificial meat from beef stem cells. With that technology it would cost no more to grow
more expensive meats like goat, lamb, caribou, rhinoceros and homo sapiens. If Catholics can figure out some way to
reconstruct Jesus’s DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid), they could literally serve the flesh of Jesus, cooked or
raw, at communion as they falsely claim to do now.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Economics of Cruelty

In the days of slavery, slave-produced cotton was cheaper and out-competed cotton produced by paid labourers.
Today, ordinary eggs produced by confining chickens with their feet wired to the bottom
of tiny cages out-compete free range eggs produced by chickens than can run around
outside. Eggs ought to be labelled with a photo of how they were produced, then, if that does not stop the trade in
cruel eggs, all but free range eggs should be made illegal for the same reason we
abolished slavery.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Elephant Thieves

Man has pushed elephants off almost their entire original range so that now only a handful of elephants remain.
Yet man has the gall to term elephants crop raiders and detusks or shoots them, as if
the elephants were the ones stealing.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Elk vs Man

In Banff, rangers use sheepdogs to run elk off their golf course. Of course, from the elk point of view, the
humans invaded their pasture and built a golf course.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Estimating Intelligence

Our estimation of the intelligence of any creature rises with time.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Evolving Slaves

Slave owners considered their slaves as livestock. So presumably they would have selectively bred them just as
they did horses, cows and dogs. They likely introduced their own genes into the mix from recreational sex with the
slaves. What traits were they trying to enhance? Yet I never hear about this or what effect it had in
differentiating American blacks from Africans. What effect does this have on black people living in the USA today?
It is probably considered too sensitive a topic.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Experiments

We are horrified at Dr. Mengele because he performed experiments on humans that we perform on animals. I suspect
future generations will not see that much difference. Both were done without informed consent.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Factory Cruelty

If someone were taught torturing chickens in their back yard doing the same things factory farmers to do them
routinely, the police would throw the book at them and the neighbours would drive them out of town.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Farmer Extortionists

Poultry farmers are extortionists. They demand yet more money not to torture chickens.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Father and Son Bonding

Why is it Americans consider killing creatures and watching them writhe in death agony the most exciting and
wholesome possible activity for a father and son to share?

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

First Rights For Horses

In 1821, Colonel Richard Martin, MP (Member of Parliament)
for Galway in Ireland, introduced the Treatment of Horses bill into the House of Commons. It was hooted down amid
shouts that the next thing would be rights for asses, dogs and cats. He persisted and his bill was passed a year
later. The law made it illegal to beat, abuse, or ill-treat any horse, mare, gelding, mule,
ass, ox, cow, heifer, steer, sheep or other cattle with fines up to five pounds and two months imprisonment
— more teeth that today’s laws have, though not well enforced.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Fish Feel Pain

Biologist Victoria Braithwaite in her book Do Fish Feel Pain?
presents evidence fish are more intelligent and their behaviour more complex than we’d given them credit for.
Anyone who has watched fish has seen them react just like other animals when hurt. The default assumption should be
they too feel pain until proven otherwise.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Fish Have No Feelings

Fish have no feelings. What an idiotic idea. They behave just like humans when you hook them. They have nervous
systems and brains. The only reason such an idea gets any traction is because of wishful thinking. People
don’w like it that fish suffer when humans catch them, so they pretend they don’t.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Fish Torture

People who would never dream of torturing a creature will casually discard plastic rings like the one that severed
this fish.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Flavours of Suffering

Even though we know that all mammals have equal capacity to suffer, for some reason some suffering is more equal
than others. The suffering of the young, the beautiful or the human counts more.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Foolish Killing of Endangered Species

People who buy rhinoceros horn, dried seahorses or bear gall bladders have no excuse. They know they are driving
the animals to extinction. They know there are now far better treatments for erectile dysfunction.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Free Range, Rah Rah Rah!

French Bull Fighting

In French bullfighting, the bull is neither harmed nor killed. Surely this form of fighting requires greater
bravery than the Spanish style where the bull is crippled by the picadors to keep its head low. It is time to
propagandise Spanish bull fighting as cowardly.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Frog-Despising Zoologist

When I was in high school, my teachers arranged a number of field trips to the local University Of BC. On one of
the trips, we visited a zoologist who had a filthy aquarium full of African frogs. One of them was dead, rotting
and floating on the surface. It was clear from the researcher’s responses to my questions that he was
completely indifferent to the welfare of the frogs and that he was proud of this indifference. I was baffled. I
felt intense affection for small fish, amphibians and reptiles. How could he be so curious about his frogs and yet
not care about them?

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Galactic SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals)

If ever we are visited by aliens, it will be a delegation from the galactic SPCA. coming to shut
us down for atrocities to fellow species, especially elephants, dolphins and whales.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Game Food

When high-end restaurants serve non-domesticated animals, they refer to them as game,
as if the slaughter of the animals were primarily an pleasant entertainment, like playing Backgammon. If they
served human flesh, would they still call it game? or would they call it desperation?

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Gentler Testing

I was wondering why animal testing of shampoos required applying chemicals in such concentrations and durations
the rabbits went blind. Surely it would sufficient to push them to the point of showing irritation. Then it hit me.
The cosmetic companies don’t care if their shampoos irritate. Plenty of them do. They are just worried about
lawsuits from someone claiming the shampoo made them go blind. Still, what they are doing makes no sense, since
chemicals that cause blindness are of no legal relevance because they don’t make it into the products. There
is no need to prove that caustic chemicals are indeed seriously harmful, just that they are unsuitable.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Golden Rule for Animals

A day will come when we accept the principle that you should not do to animals what you should not do to humans.
The following will thus wither away:

sport fishing including catch and release.

Factory farming.

Hunting and trapping.

Whipping horses during races.

Spanish style bull fighting.

Dog and cock fighting.

Artificial insemination.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Harvesting

Traditional wisdom says you should throw back or avoid catching small fish/animals so they can grow up. However,
consider that the most likely fate of such small fry is to be eaten by a predator or taken by disease. A large
animal is rare. It must be genetically superior to reach that age/size. It is already capable of spawning another
generation of superior creatures. So perhaps instead, you should throw back the large fish and eat the small
ones.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Help Yourself

You may have noticed how quotations pop up at random all over my website, aimed at getting people to re-examine
the way the see animals and animal cruelty. You are welcome to use any or all of the quotations in my
quotation collection
in a similar way on your own website. To get your point across these days, you have to shrink it to a sound
bite.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

High School Turtle Torture

When I was high school, a biology teacher, Mr. Jackson cut the bottom shell off a live turtle and attached its
heart to a lever that charted the twitchings on a graph. I told everyone he was a sadist. Mr. Mackenzie, the
principal, called me down to his office and gently chastised me for slandering a teacher. Mr. Jackson reassured me
The turtle feels no pain. I countered How do you know? He
replied It’s spinal nerves are cut. I said Well, it sure looks
as if it is in pain. It is struggling frantically to right itself. He responded That is
just a reflex. He offered Using the turtle will save many lives. This turtle will last
all day. Had I used frogs, I would have had to kill one for each class I accused Your
experiment has no point. Everyone already knows that hearts beat He said You are
planning a career in biology. You will have to get used to this I said If that’s
what it means to be a biologist I want no part of it. Since I am writing this years later, I can compose a
better retort: If you are so sure this will not hurt, how about I poke a scalpel into the back
of your neck and cut your spinal nerves. Then you can reassure me, based on evidence, that the
procedure is painless. From my personal experience, nerves hurt like the blazes when you cut them. Turtle nerves
and human nerves are almost identical.

That was the last day of my biology career and my first day of animal rights advocacy.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Human Inconsistency

Humans are such a diverse species. Some torture animals for pleasure. Others spend thousands of dollars for
surgery to patch them up again.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Human Interests Trump

Usually we treasure that which is rare, but when it comes to animals, the interests of any human, no matter how
trivial or how crass, always trumps that of any animal.

Animal Populations

Animal Populations

Global
Population

Animal

Humans
per
Animal

200,000

gorilla

35,000

150,000

chimpanzee

46,666

32,000

caribou

218,750

20,000

gray whale

350,000

10,000

bonobo

700,000

10,000

blue whale

700,000

2,500

mangrove hummingbird

2,800,000

0

golden frog

∞

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Human Meat For Dog Treats

The Icelanders are killing fin whales for the Japanese who make them into dog treats. In my
essay
I argue why I think whales are more intelligence and more worthy than humans. To me what the Icelanders are doing
is worse than kidnapping children and puréing them to make dog food.

Human-Animal Violence

Humans use violence against animals all the time. The law rarely intervenes. But if an animal uses violence
against a human, it is immediately executed without trial, no matter what the provocation. Further, any human who
used violence to defend an animal against another human will be prosecuted as if the violence were unprovoked. He
cannot use a variant of the self defence excuse. The defence excuse is valid only when protecting an animal of the
human species. Why the asymmetry? Humans believe they are superior to all other species and they are the only
species deserving of legal projection. In a few cases, the law will intervene to protect salmon. But this is not
because humans believe the salmon have any inherent right to life; killing salmon is considered equivalent to
destroying some other human’s food.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Inconvenient Pain

There was a time in recent memory when physicians believed babies could not feel pain. They performed open heart
surgery and circumcisions on the them without any anaesthesia.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

I think it is time we presumed, until proven otherwise, that any creature that cries or writhes to
avoid a painful stimulus is indeed feeling pain.

Intelligence is Not Such a Big Deal

Humans imagine their intelligence makes them infinitely superior to everything else in the cosmos. This
can’t be true. Intelligence can’t be that big a deal because we share 99% of
our DNA
with chimpanzees and because our intelligence evolved almost overnight. It must be just a handful of relatively
simple tricks.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Inuit Cruelty

It is demeaning to excuse animal cruelty in the Inuit and other native peoples. It is like excusing them on the
grounds they are children, that they should not be held to the same high standards of their betters. Excusing them
on the grounds the cruelty is ancestral is like excusing Christians for burning witches or dragging homosexuals
behind cars just because they did it in the past.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Japanese Government Scam

Here is what I wrote to the Government of Japan: I was
absolutely shocked to learn that you improperly misappropriated funds intended for tsunami relief to your whale
killing masquerading as research. Anyone in North American who donated to help you out feels
betrayed at this theft. Don’t ask for any help ever again. Give them an earful too.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Killer Snake

If somebody told you a horse had taken its oats and dug little pits in a field and buried oats in the pits to
eat later, you might be sceptical. If somebody told you a python had killed two prey and saved them both to eat
later, you would say to yourself, that is not the way snakes behave. They always eat their prey immediately after
killing it. Further, they take weeks or months to digest before feeding again.

On 2013-08-05, a 4.30 metres(14.11 ft)
African rock python allegedly killed two sleeping boys in New Brunswick but did not eat them. This in the first
time in recorded history anything like this has happened. The python was immediately executed before any
investigation could be completed. The story in the news kept changing about where the snake lived and how it got to
the boys.

On the other paw, a handler said the snake had a temperamental disposition and wasn’t
used to being around humans.

On the other paw, pythons attack only when they feel threatened. Why would it be threatened by sleeping
boys?

The CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
censored me when I tried to discuss this anomaly on their website. I think they were squeamish about the thought of
a snake eating a child.

I would hope a full autopsy would ensure the children were not only asphyxiated, but asphyxiated by the snake
executed for the crime by looking for scale prints on the boys’ necks and snake DNA
traces. I just don’t want the book closed without an explanation for this mystery. My best explanation so far
is when the snake fell from the ceiling vent it was badly frightened, which caused it to lash out.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Killing Dolphins

The ancient Hawaiians hunted dolphins by pounding rocks together under water. The dolphins surfaced with blood
streaming from the ears. Zookeepers are well aware of how sensitive whales, fish and reptiles are to vibration, but
to do nothing to stop little brats from pounding on the glass all day long or to isolate the animals from the
vibrations.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Lead Buckshot

So-called sportsmen have known for years that lead is poisonous, but they still use it for buckshot. Now many
lakes are fatal for ducks who land there because the sediments are carpeted in lead.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Lead Fishing Weights

So-called sportsmen have known for years that lead is poisonous, but they continue to use it for fishing
weights.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Leave Them Alone

Whenever man decides to manage populations of other species, he usually screws things up with unintended
consequences. In general, we should not do this. We know that leaving animals alone is guaranteed to work.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Life as a Cow

If I were a cow, I would far sooner be permitted to graze outside in a pasture for all but the last hours of my
life than have some sanctimonious Christian offer a prayer for me after he had butchered me after keeping me
confined in a filthy feed lot my entire life.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Life in the Dolphin Lane

Imagine going to a cocktail party with 200 guests, each zooming around at
65 km/hr(40.39 mph)
and maintaining a conversation with each of the guests simultaneously, all talking at once. Dolphins do it all the
time. One trick they use to help sort it all out is putting the name of the recipient on the front of each phrase,
much the way a computer does when talking on a LAN (Local Area Network). The closest a human would come is sitting on
a bus texting with many friends at once.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Live Food

On 2013-12-21CBC
Radio The Current did a show about eating live octopus. The guest, Dana Goodyear, described the taste and texture,
the way the suckers clung excitingly to her throat and the arms charmingly climbed her chopstick. She also bemoaned
the loss of fois gras (totally ignoring it was banned because of cruelty to geese). This decadent bitch does not
understand that the octopus (along with the cuttlefish) is the most intelligent of invertebrates. They are
comparable to dogs. Would she consider eating a dog live, strapped to her table? I hope she chokes to death on a
live banana slug slathered in pig turd sauce.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Local Customs

Let us say I went to live in mainland China. Let’s say I made a habit of grabbing and hugging people I was
introduced to. I would walk down the streets snapping my fingers and whistling Bach. I would put my feet up my desk
when I talked with people. I would point at interesting things with my foot. I would loudly blow my nose into a
silk handkerchief then fold it up as if it were something precious and save it in my pocket for later consumption.
My hosts would consider me an utter boor for not paying attention to the local customs. When Chinese people come to
Canada, they eat shark’s fin soup, which many Canadians consider so repulsive and barbaric, they have murder
fantasies. You would think the Chinese would be more sensitive to local customs. They seem to take delight in
angering Canadians.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Measuring Consciousness

How can you tell if a creature is conscious? You can tell if it is not conscious if it does not react to
stimulus, but even a plant reacts to stimulus (albeit slowly). You know that you are conscious and
presumably other humans are the same, but everything else, you are just guessing until we find some way to measure
or detect consciousness. What bothers me is so many scientists claim such and such a
creature is or is not conscious. How could they possibly tell?

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Meat

We treat domestic animals, particularly chickens and pigs with extreme cruelty. If we treated humans that way,
we would call it torture. If you don’t want to torture animals, what can you do about it?

Become a vegetarian.

Pay farmers to treat animals ethically. Buy only free-range eggs and meat. Since these products are more
expensive, you may have to cut down your consumption.

In China, they would never slap down an 226.80 grams(8 oz) slab of meat in front of you. They cut
it into small pieces as use it as a condiment. This makes it go a lot further.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Meat Euphemisms

North Americans are squeamish about meat-eating. They have special words to disguise the fact they are eating
cows, calves, sheep, deer, pigs, stomachs, brains, intestines, muscles, testicles, penises… They like their
steaks bloody, but use the euphemism juicy.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Monumental Conceit

Most of mankind’s problem stem from his monumental conceit and self-centredness. He believes in religions
that preposterously flatter him that the entire universe was created solely for his benefit and he is the center of
it. He believes no other species matters at all. He steals lands from them and enslaves them, and even tortures
them without even allowing the interests of those other species to be heard. In the process, he forgets that he too
is an animal just as dependent on the other animals, plants, water, air and soil as any other animal.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Moose, Yuch!

When we were kids, each fall, my Dad would go hunting for deer and moose. When he returned we would shout in a
chorus, Did you get anything? When he answered No, we would
cheer and he would give us an irritated look. We did not like him killing animals. We not like the bitter taste of
endless moose and venison dinners. We did not like the stench of the rotting skins and the hanging aging/rotting meat. We looked on this as a sort of Jekyll/Hyde transformation of our normally
gentle father.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Natural Indifference

In nature, indifference is the norm, with the exception of concern for offspring. It is thus remarkable that
humans have any concern at all for the welfare other species. You will notice, for example, that conservationist
arguments are nearly always couched in terms of self-interest.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

No to Grain Fed

You probably want to avoid any beef or chicken labelled grain fed. It means the
animals were penned tightly, knee deep in liquid manure and force fed grain, a not a natural food for either cattle
nor chickens. They become obese. The meat has a high fat content and hence will make you obese too.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Not Really About Whales

Almost any time you pick up a book about whales, it turns out to be really be about the men who killed
them.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Observing Ants

Humans tend to feel creeped out when they discover that ants enslave aphids and other homoptera, feeding off
their secretions. Yet they rarely are grossed out by humans doing the same thing and worse to domestic
mammals.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Original Function of Pets

The two most popular pets, the dog and the cat, are both predators. That is no accident. They were not
originally pets, but rat killers and hunters.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Owning An Inappropriate Term

You would not speak of owning your children, even if you are responsible for their care and feeding and
have many legal rights similar to the ownership of chattels. We need to find an appropriate word to use for the
relationship of children and other animals in your stewardship. Owning is something you do to a stereo
system. How about I steward my St. Bernard? For creatures with brains larger than humans’, we need
something a little more humble, perhaps I serve or I see to the needs of Rosie the dolphin.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Packing Cattle

Cattle are packed as closely as possible in feedlots to keep them from being able to move. The less they move,
the faster they pile on weight.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Pain ≠ Intelligence

If a retarded child hit his thumb with a hammer, or Einstein hit his thumb with a hammer, the pain is the same.
You know someone is in pain by the way they scream and writhe. The same is true for the pain an animal experiences.
It a convenient lie that just because a creature is not intelligent, it cannot feel pain. That is just an excuse
for mistreatment. Our nervous systems and chemistry of pain are identical. Think I’m pulling your leg? Read
Do Fish Feel Pain?
to see what science has to say on the question.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

The Paragon Of Animals

Largely because of Christian influence, when humans study animals they have a strong bias to presume humans are
superior by every measure except athleticism, despite the evidence.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Preserving Mosquitos

Do you like mosquitos? No? Then kindly stop wiping out all the frogs that eat them.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Property Rights

People refer to my property. They believe the have exclusive right to the land. They
claim the right to kill anyone or anything that trespasses.

It took four hundred years for white people to question whether they had a moral right to invade North America
and push the indigenous people off their lands. Perhaps in another four hundred years we will question whether we
humans had the right to invade the ancestral habitats of wildlife and push them off their land. Perhaps we will
learn to share lands with the original inhabitants.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Puppy/Chicken Inequality

If a man treated a puppy the way farmers treat chickens, mobs would burn down his house.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Relative Abundance

Consider the panic that ensues if someone suggests culling pigeons, rabbits, deer or kittens. Consider the
complete ho-hum when the extinction or near extinction of some species is announced. It seems the safer the
creature is from extinction, the bigger the fuss.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Republican = Animal Cruelty

Republicanism is the political arm of the animal cruelty movement. Republicanism teaches that all that matters
is profit. The suffering of others, human or animal does not matter. It exalts selfishness even when small personal
indulgences bring major suffering for others.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Republicans Plead Poverty

Republicans plead poverty when it comes to fair trade coffee or free range eggs, then spend hundreds of
thousands of dollars on gas-guzzling cars and sprawling energy-inefficient homes so they can impress their friends
with how wealthy they are.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Retarded Children

Consider the behaviour of a severely retarded child. We offer to them the full protection of the law from harm
and death. I think any animal that can demonstrate the same functionality as a retarded child should be given the
same guarantees and rights.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Revenge

In 1920 a male sperm whale rammed and sank the whaling ship, the Essex. The 21 crew were
cast adrift to die by exposure and thirst in the South Pacific. That is about as horrible a death as imaginable.
These fool whalers had no idea of the magnitude of their crime for which they were so fittingly punished.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Rise of the Apes

For millions of years the dolphins and whales have been the playful kings of the sea. Then one day primates came
down from the trees, figured out how to construct boats, then set out to sea to kill them all. In dolphin lore, we
must be like the coming of the bubonic plague, only worse. The plague killed only 1/3 of
us then disappeared. You’d think the would kill or torture humans every chance they get, but they are too
smart for that.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Sadistic Sealers

Canadian sealers enjoy hacking baby seals to death with a hakapik, a heavy wooden club with a hammer head and
metal hook on the end because they want to punish the seals for stealingtheir fish. They
forget that long before the seal hunt, cod were so abundant you could walk across their
backs. Seals selectively eat the weak and diseased fish thus improving the stocks and
preventing the spread of epidemics. In 2008 public outcry banned the hakapik and insisted
seals bleed for a minute before skinning.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Salmon Sisyphus

When I was quite young I visited a fish hatchery. There were some salmon swimming in a tank with a flow of water
forcing them to keep swimming. The attendant explained these fish spend their entire lives in this tank. They might
have the same spot in line for years at a time. This struck me as a ghastly metaphor for the human rat race. I
could not believe humans could impose such a nightmare on such a noble fish.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Selfish Bitches

Activists have had an impossible time ending the trade is blood diamonds and furs from animals killed in
deliberately cruel traps because the selfish bitches who consume the products get off on the suffering.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Selfish Meat Choices

A free range pig farmer pointed out most people use nothing but price to decide which pork to buy. Some buy free
range, not because it is less cruel to the pigs, but because the pigs don’t have to be saturated with
antibiotics the way they do in cages and they don’t want to put antibiotics into their bodies. Basically,
most people are effectively accepting small payments from farmers to give permission to the farmers to torture
pigs. And we wonder how slavery, child labour and third world sweat shops managed to persist so long.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Shark Fin Soup

Chinese cuisine has more options for ingredients than any other. Complaining about the loss of one dish —
shark fin soup, an endangered species harvested in a deliberately sadistic way is pathetic. Shame on those who
refuse to make even the tiniest sacrifice. Their selfishness is shameful. The motive, conspicuous consumption, and
bragging about one’s wealth is revolting.

CBC
radio in Victoria aired a woman who claimed the practice of cutting fins off living sharks was a myth. Captain Paul
Watson of the Sea Shepherd Society is on the lam for
protesting this very practice. If you Google shark fin
images, you can see for yourself.

Shark Fin Soup

Shark fin soup is tasteless. Its only value is as a status symbol costing
$100.00 CAD
a bowl. Chinese fishermen haul endangered sharks from the ocean and hack their fins off and toss them back into the
ocean where the sharks die slowly.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Shark Wrestling

Shark wrestling is the only form of fishing that has a right to call itself a sport.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Shunning Humanity

If there are intelligent beings in space watching us, I don’t think they would want anything to do with a
species who cavalierly toss a species or more per day into extinction or who torture fellow mammals needlessly as
part of food production.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Sicilian Ecocrime

Sicilians to this day massively slaughter endangered blue fin tuna, just before they can spawn. If the Japanese
can give up traditional whaling, surely we must demand the Sicilians give up this environmental crime. If they
refuse, then the rest of the world should boycott all Sicilian goods and services.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Solitary Confinement

Is there any moral difference between keeping a lion and a human in solitary confinement?

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Soul = Suffering

Christians postulated that horses and slaves had no souls and presumably thus could not even truly feel pain
despite how it looked. This meant it was ok to beat them or work them to death. How convenient that this soul was
invisible and undetectable. Its existence could be asserted or taken away at whim without evidence. Modern day
Christians mistreat whales whose brains are considerably larger than theirs, justified with similar medieval
superstition.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Spanish Sadism

The essence of Spanish culture is sadism. It goes back centuries. For example:

A particularly cruel, cowardly and unfair form of bull fighting that should be called bull
tormenting or bull torture. The French have a version that does not kill the
bull and puts the toreadors at greater risk.

Religion in Spain involves flagellation and bleeding.

The Spanish Inquisition mastered the art of torture as no other.

The Spanish conquistadors were utterly merciless in their conquest of the Americas.

The Spanish were unbelievably cruel to their Moorish citizens.

And now in 2013 the Spanish have revived pig sticking — the ancient Roman
entertainment of killing wild boars by sticking them with spears.

If Span cannot outgrow this sort of primitive behaviour, Spain does not belong in the EU.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Spay Your Cat

A single cat’s descendants would number 950,000 in ten years if they did not die
from euthanasia or homelessness. If you don’t spay your cat, you are necessarily condemning her descendants
to an early death.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

SPCA

The SPCA
was founded in 1824 in Britain. The ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals)
was founded in 1866.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Studying Captives

If you wanted to learn about black people, you could go to a prison and watch one through the bars in solitary
confinement lying on his bunk bored out of his mind. Or you could go to a black neighbourhood and have a look at
all going on. Or you might watch a film. The same is true of lions. Going to traditional zoo gives you a very
warped view of what lions are like.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Stupid Sealers

I can hardly believe how stupid the seal hunters were guaranteeing their defeat.

They insisted on using the hakapik to hack the seals to death, thus portraying themselves as sadistic
bastards.

They tortured Paul Watson for his protests.

They projected a manly fuck-you attitude to those who disagreed with them, a
ruthless enjoyment of shocking protestors with excess barbarity. They projected themselves as rednecks.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Thought Experiment

When I was 14, I came up with this thought experiment. Imagine it were possible to
replace a single nerve cell with an electronic equivalent that behaved transparently. Imagine it were possible to
replace a single blood cell with an electronic equivalent that behaved transparently. Let’s say we start
replacing cells in a being, we will call Jimmy, with equivalents one by one. Any any stage our Jimmy is still
indistinguishable from the original. Jimmy still dreams and has an internal conscious experience. Let’s say,
as were replacing, we constructed a duplicate. When we are done we have two identical Jimmy androids. The common
sense view in the 1960s would assert that one Jimmy was conscious and the duplicate was
not, even though they were absolutely identical. How could you tell which was which? I find that absurd. It seems
to me simpler to assume that brain activity in some way creates consciousness. It is not as though ghosts/souls
possess bodies and the original Jimmy had one of these souls and the duplicate did not. Even if there were such
things as souls, both bodies should be equally suitable homes for a soul. I so I fully expect complex machines to
evolve consciousness.

Through a Possum’s Eyes

In a documentary, I was watching an opossum stalking a snail. The black snail glistened and writhed. For a
fraction of second, I could see the snail as delicious and desirable, the way the opossum would.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Touching Dead Animals

Few women could be persuaded to touch a dead pig. Yet if you cut it up in pieces, called it pork or bacon, not
only would they touch it, they would eat it.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Toward More Humane Slaughter

Priests long ago commanded people to slaughter animals in a humane way they called Kosher and later Halal. Today
there are more humane ways to slaughter animals, but Jews and Muslims refuse to use them. They stick with the old
ways, adhering to the letter rather than the spirit of the law.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Traditional Rights To Kill

The Makah claim a right to kill whales because their ancestors did. By that reasoning, modern day descendants of
the Aztecs have the right to revive child sacrifice; Americans have the right to revive slavery; and Indonesians
have the right to revive head-hunting. The notion that sacrificing a whale would somehow help the Makah’s
social ills including drug addiction, poverty and alcoholism is as nutty as thinking yanking the heart out of a
child and throwing it into a volcano would work too. Whale sacrifice is an ill-considered distraction from doing
something truly useful. Further, there many more Makah today than before the coming of the Europeans. They
can’t hunt as they did because they would put far too much pressure on the environment.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Trout Homes

There few places as beautiful as a mountain lake brimming with rainbow trout. There are few places as depressing
as aquaculture pens for these same noble fish.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Turtle Torture

People who would never dream of torturing an animal will casually discard plastic rings like the one that deformed
this snapping turtle.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Two Kinds of Conservationists

There are two kinds of conservationists: the rare type believe that animals have an inherent right to a corner
of the earth to live unmolested. The more common type want other people to stop killing off animals so they
can.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Two-Way Communication

When humans talk of inter-species communication they usually mean the art of bullying animals to perform tricks.
True communication should also include the ability read an animal’s messages about its desires the same as
you would inquire about the needs of a human friend.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Typical Human Behaviour

The heroes of the British Sci Fi TV series Torchwood, torture, cage
and kill alien visitors to earth. How else could they behave? This is how humans usually treat other species.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Vegan Nit Picking

I think vegans make rather too much of the distinction between euthanising an elderly dog then discarding the
corpse and killing a mature cow humanely then eating it. What counts is how well you treat animals while they are
alive, not what happens to the corpses after they are dead. Animals do not revere their own corpses.

Meat production produces more total sewage than people do. By odd legal fluke, it is dumped into rivers
untreated.

A low meat diet reduces risk of heart disease and obesity.

Usually animals used for meat are mistreated and kept in filthy over-crowded barns or cages.

However, I consider the argument that killing animals is cruel to be bogus. What is the alternative? Letting an
animal get old and arthritic with failing kidneys and die slowly? Surely that entails far more suffering that a
quick bolt to the brain. The other alternative is to ensure the animal is never born. I would think a free range
cow would be happy for a chance to exist, even if life ended suddenly. Vegetarians consider eating meat disgusting.
However, the cow does not care what happens to its corpse. The normal thing in nature is for corpses to be eaten.
All that matters to the cow is how well it is treated while it is alive.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Veggie Fed Unnatural

Egg producers advertise their eggs come from veggie fed chickens, as if a diet of pure
grain were natural and healthful for a chicken. Chickens left to their own devices eat all manner of shoots, seeds,
insects and worms they find while scratching in the dirt.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Weasel Words

Whenever hunters talk about killing animals they never say shoot or kill. They say
harvest (as if deer were pumpkins), bag (as if the deer were potatoes) or take (as if
the deer were kept alive).

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Were It Done To Us

Imagine if some advanced species decided to interfere with human reproduction, selecting the most grossly fat
males as the only suitable mates then later forbidding copulation altogether, managing all reproduction with
artificial insemination. Might we humans harbour a little resentment? It would be hypocritical of us to complain
since this is what we have done to pigs and cattle.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

We’re The Best

Early anthropologists spent their time pointing out how superior European culture was to everyone else’s.
Early animal behaviourists are intent on proving man is the paragon of animals. When they discovered that
Neanderthals had bigger brains than us, they immediately reversed themselves and decided smaller brains meant
greater intelligence. If a dolphin and a man perform identical actions, behaviourists will interpret the
dolphins’ acts in the most demeaning possible ways and interpret man’s as intelligent
transcendence.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Whale Bondage

Compared with the space a cetacean roams over a day, an aquarium is like being bound in a full body cast.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Whale Captivity

Belugas have brains larger than humans. We know they communicate with each other, even if we are too dumb to
figure out what they are saying. Surely the belugas should have a say in whether they will be kept confined in
relatively microscopic cages. Dolphins, for example, range over 80.47 km(50 miles) a day. Tanks are like encasing them in plaster. Pro-captivity whale keepers are
self-centered. All they care about are the interests of fellow whale keepers. They treat the belugas as if they
were mindless sea cows.

They argue you need captivity to study whales. The information gleaned is useful in preservation.

We now have much better tools too study whales in the wild: sensors, cameras, GPS transmitters. Studying whales in captivity is like studying human behaviour by
studying prisoners in solitary. Further, it is simply wrong too keep intelligent, innocent beings in solitary.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

What Do You Think of Homo Sapiens

What would you think of a man who stole the homes of his relatives and evicted them? What would you think of a
man who drove his relatives off the lands they used to feed themselves, leaving them to starve to death? What would
you think of a species that threw other species after species into permanent extinction by stealing their habitat?
What you would think of a species so conceited that it believed the very creator of the universe gave them title to
the entire planet to do with as they pleased without any concern for their cousins on the tree of life?

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Man does this even to species with larger brains than he has, such as elephants, whales and
dolphins.

What’s Conscious

How do you decide which species of animals are conscious and which are not? Recently scientists have been
changing their minds and declaring mammals and birds conscious. We humans are sometimes conscious and sometimes
not, e.g. when under anaesthesia. What other criteria could you use to decide if some species is conscious than the
how closely a creature behaves like a conscious or unconscious human? Perhaps that could be fine tuned with an MRI.
Which creatures are declared conscious is usually a religious and economic determination. If it would be humbling
or inconvenient to presume a creature conscious, it is declared incapable of pain without any objective
evidence.

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Wild Animal Health Care

So far it has never occurred to mankind to use technology for the benefit of species other than man and
domesticated species. At some point we might consider medicine and dentistry for wild creatures, helping caribou
with their plaguing hordes of mosquitos, cleaning up water to optimal condition for fish…

~ Roedy(born:1948-02-04 age:68)

Wild Not Zoo

You will learn far more from one of David Attenborough’s wildlife documentaries, than you will watching
animals trying to sleep at a zoo in a totally artificial environment. Studying animals in a zoo is like studying
humanity by watching people in solitary confinement. As 3D animal photography matures, the difference will be even
more pronounced. It is possible to create a realistic environment only for very small animals like tropical fish
and lizards. Consider that a dolphin can swim hundreds of miles a day in the wild. There is no way to simulate that
in a tank.